[For a more detailed history and cultural
overview of ancient Greece, see the Perseus web site (click
here).]

I. Geography and Greek Culture

The
geography of Greece is a primary factor, if not the pre-eminent feature of the
culture and lives of the ancient populations who lived there. Inhabiting an
area that is ninety percent mountains with little arable land forced the Greeks
into ways of life which did not center strictly around farming and agriculture.
They were, for the most part, driven to go to sea to make ends meet. Indeed,
no place in Greece is further than fifty miles from the sea, so the inevitability
of fishing and maritime adventure was incumbent on many in antiquity, as it
still is. To this day, many Greeks make a living in shipping, for instance,
Aristotle Onassis, the multi-millionaire who acquired a fortune in international
trade and married Jacqueline Kennedy after the assassination of her first husband.

Ironically, while the mountainous topography pushed the Greeks to explore lands
far beyond their immediate locale, at the same time it also separated the cities
of Greece and obstructed intra-Hellenic contact, leading many of them to develop
along discrete, sometimes incompatible lines. For instance, settlements as close
as Athens and Thebes which are less than sixty miles apart not only came to
see each other as "foreign" but even evolved a long-lasting rivalry
that persisted into the Classical Age. Ironically, in some ways the ancient
Greeks became generally friendlier with peoples across the sea than their own
neighbors, because the landscape made foreign nations seem "closer"
than many cities on the Greek mainland.

Overall, their geographical situation forced the ancient Greeks from early
on to look outward from their immediate locality and internationalize their
interests. This broadened their horizons and exposed them like few other civilizations
to foreign ideas and ways of living. The ensuing cosmopolitanism played an important
role in their development as a focal group in ancient Western Civilization.
For a people living on the edge of nowhere, they found themselves uniquely thrust
in medias res ("into the middle of things").

II. The Prehistory of Greece

The earliest inhabitants of Greece are a mysterious—and possibly mythological—people
called the Pelasgians about whom we know very little. These
natives and their culture were overwhelmed and ultimately utterly annihilated
by the invasion of a new people known now as the Indo-Europeans
(click here to read more
about the Indo-Europeans). If it were not for a handful of Pelasgian words like
plinth ("brick"), a term preserved in ancient Greek, along
with a few city-names like Corinth and other scattered vestiges of the Pelasgians'
language, we would hardly even know these people ever existed. That's how completely
devastating was the Indo-European conquest of this region.

So,
when people today study the ancient Greeks, they are examining not the earliest
known humans in the area but later invaders called the Indo-Europeans. This
is clear because of the language the Greeks spoke. All extant forms of ancient
Greek clearly derive from a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European,
a language which engendered a large number of daughter languages found across
much of the Eurasian continent, all the way from India to Norway. These closely
related tongues show that the Indo-Europeans must have migrated over thousand
of miles in different directions, displacing natives and settling themselves
in lands across a wide swath of the Eurasian continent.

Another thing we know about the Indo-Europeans is that they tended to enter
a region in successive waves. That is, Indo-Europeans rarely migrated into an
area just once, and Greece was no exception. As early as 2000 BCE one Indo-European
contingent had begun infiltrating the Greek peninsula and by the end of that
millennium at least three major discrete migrations of these intruders had surged
across various parts of Greece.

One
racial group of these Indo-Europeans was called the Ionians.
They settled along the eastern coast of Greece, in particular the city of Athens,
and along the western coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey).
Another group, the Dorians, settled the Peloponnese
(the southern part of Greece) and many inland areas. The result was a "dark
age" accompanied by massive disruptions in the Greek economy and civilization,
including a total loss of literacy.

This dark age lasted about three centuries, from 1100 to 800 BCE and, while
it seems from our perspective today like a dismal time, it must have been a
dynamic and fascinating period in Greek history, perhaps a wonderful time to
have lived. The lack of written historical records—the inevitable product
of the age's illiteracy—leaves the impression of a vast void but, to judge
the period from its outcome, it gave shape to much of the rest of Greek history.
Many of the things we associate with Greek culture—for instance, vase-painting,
epic poetry, and ship-building—assumed their basic and most familiar forms
during this "dark" age.

Particularly,
many of the Greek myths read and studied today are traceable to this time period.
Quite a few are set in the generations just before the dark age or in its early
phases. For example, the famous cycle ("collection") of myths about
the Trojan War—if, in fact, it is based on any real event
in history—must date to some time around 1185 BCE. These myths found their
most brilliant expression in the early Greek epic poems attributed
to Homer, ancient Greece's greatest early poet.

Homer's
first epic, The Iliad, tells the tale of the Greeks'
sack of Troy and the anger of their great hero, Achilles. Among other famous
characters included there are the beautiful Helen and her hapless Greek husband
Menelaus, the king of Sparta. His brother, Agamemnon, the king of neighboring
Mycenae who leads the expedition of Greeks to Troy, is married to Helen's sister
Clytemnestra with whom he has several children including Electra and Orestes.
All later became enduring characters in drama as well as epic. The gods also
play a large role in The Iliad, in particular, the king of the gods
Zeus, the sun god Apollo, and the goddess of wisdom Athena.

Homer's
other epic, The Odyssey, narrates the adventures of the Greek hero
Odysseus as he wanders around the Mediterranean Sea trying for ten years to
get home to Ithaca, an island on the western coast of Greece. Along the way
he encounters a number of deities and monsters and much mayhem, but ultimately
with the help of his patroness, the goddess Athena, he arrives back in his kingdom
safe, if not entirely sound. There encounters his wife Penelope and son Telemachus
after an absence of twenty years.

These stories convey such a compelling sense of realism about their day and
time that more than one scholar has been tempted to see in them history rather
than mere myth, but their historicity is questionable at best. One such investigator
was Heinrich Schliemann, a nineteenth-century German millionaire
and archaeologist, who excavated what is now known as Troy.
This site in the northwestern corner of Asia Minor near the straits that separate
Asia and Europe indeed contains the ruins of a once-great city that thrived
in the middle to late second millennium BCE, but is this site Homer's Troy?
Even if its name was Troy—and there is no firm evidence to that effect—that
still leaves open the question of the extent to which Homer's epics preserve
historical reality. The debate about the amount of verifiable history preserved
in Homeric epic lingers unresolved to this day, a tribute to the enduring, gripping
picture of humanity painted by this purportedly blind poet. [To read more about
Troy, Homer and Schliemann, click here.]

III. The Pre-Classical Age of Greek History

With
the reappearance of written records after the dark age, Greek history as such
comes back into focus. From the earliest extant inscriptions and vase-paintings
with writing on them, we know that the alphabet was introduced to the Greek
world at some point around 800 BCE, which is probably at or about the time Homer
himself lived. This provides one way to explain why his epics, originally composed
"orally" (i.e. as narratives which were not written down), were preserved.
They came into being at just the right moment, when oral poets were still active
but writing had been introduced so oral poetry could be recorded. This revolutionary
period in Greek history—and indeed world history—witnessed the rise
of the polis, the classical city-state (for instance,
Athens, Sparta and Corinth) which would dominate the political scene for several
centuries. These quasi-independent communities in their inter-political rivalry
elevated Western civilization to unprecedented heights.

This epoch now known as the Pre-Classical Age (800-500 BCE)
is also called the Age of Tyrants because powerful individuals
came to rule the majority of these city-states by overthrowing the existing
regime in a military coup. While our word "tyrant" which comes from
the Greek tyrannos has strongly negative overtones,
the Greek term had in antiquity both negative and neutral connotations, or sometimes
even positive ones. That is, not all Greek tyrannoi (plural of tyrannos)
were seen as "tyrannical."

One,
in particular, Pisistratus of Athens, was a visionary who did
much good for his city. He established festivals that united the Athenians culturally,
boosted their economy by creating a market for Athenian exports and stabilized
Attic (i.e. Athenian) coinage, making it widely respected throughout
the Mediterranean world. Though he brought himself to power through force and
violence, he used the position he assumed to better the lives of his fellow
townsmen in general. He remained in power for many years and, when he died in
the early 520's BCE, his sons inherited his power. While they did not manage
Athens as well as their father had and were eventually ousted, Pisistratus'
lasting contributions laid the groundwork for the Athenians' rise to prominence
in the next century, the fifth century BCE (500-400 BCE), the Classical
Age.

Other
tyrants around the Greek-speaking world did much the same. More than one is
famous as a "lawgiver," the man who, even while sole ruler, paved
the way for fair and representative government in his city. Thus, this age is
also known as the Age of Lawgivers. The introduction of writing,
no doubt, played a great role in the advancement of law which initially entailed
little more than the codification of already existing custom—in Greek,
the word for "custom" is nomos which eventually became the
term used for "law"—Athens had no less than two great lawgivers:
Draco at the end of the seventh century (600's) BCE and Solon
in the next generation (the early part of the sixth century, ca. 580 BCE). Both
have left their imprint on English. A solon today means a "politician,"
and draconian means "extremely harsh or punitive" because
Draco was famous for the severity of the punishments his laws imposed.

Also,
because at this time the Greeks began to colonize large parts of the Mediterranean
world—in particular, Asia Minor and Sicily (the large
island southwest of Italy)—and the coastal regions of the Black
Sea as well, this age has also been dubbed the Age of Colonization.
In particular, the Greeks settled in large numbers in southern Italy which came
to contain so many of them that the later Romans referred to the area as Magna
Graecia ("Big Greece"). In part because of their essentially
Greek heritage, the people and culture of southern Italy and Sicily are to this
day very different from those of central and northern Italy.

The reason Greek colonization occurred on such a grand scale at this time goes
back to changes in Mesopotamia (the modern Middle East), more than once the
distant impetus for significant developments in the Western world. In the eighth
century BCE, the Assyrians had come to dominate most of the ancient Near East.
Their conquest and brutal treatment of captive states demolished many of the
existing social, political and economic structures in the day.

Among those subjugated to the Assyrians were the Phoenicians
who lived on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. From that crossroad,
they had enriched themselves through a network of commercial exchange protected
by a powerful navy but, when the Assyrians conquered and uprooted them, that
navy evaporated and the trade routes of the eastern Mediterranean were opened
up. The Greeks stepped into the vacuum, making a new life of wealth for themselves
in shipping and cultural exchange, and went on to colonize those areas where
they traveled most often, in part to protect their trade routes. Put simply,
had the Assyrians not shattered the Phoenicians, the Greeks might never have
found the economic energy needed to spark the cultural revolution they undertook
in the Classical Age.

Yet
one more way to refer to this period is the Lyric Age, a name
derived the dominant form of literature in the day. While long heroic epics
predominated as the principal form of narrative entertainment in earlier days,
by the middle of pre-classical times (ca. 650 BCE) a new kind of poetry began
to spread across the Greek world. These poems were shorter, livelier, and focused
on modern life and love, not the glorious past. Because the singers of these
poems often accompanied themselves on the lyre—the lyre
is a stringed musical instrument which could be plucked to create certain harmonies—this
sort of poetry came to be known as lyric poetry.

By
600 BCE lyric poetry ruled the ancient Greek entertainment scene. Lyric poets
and their musical verse were in great demand with the public, much the way rock
stars are today. Indeed, the analogy of lyric poetry and rock music is not altogether
off-base. In their day, Greek lyric poets were idolized, imitated and at least
one is reported to have performed in a state of intoxication.

The most famous of these, however, is also one of the
few woman's voices we hear from any quarter of antiquity. Her name is Sappho,
and her love poetry is perhaps the most famous of all time. The beauty of Sappho's
lyrics in Greek was heralded throughout antiquity, as was the complexity, subtlety
and rapturous grace of her rhythms and melodies.

Unfortunately, most of her poetry is now lost, shattered in its long passage
through neglectful ages, so much so that we are not sure we have even a single
poem of hers complete. But the many fragments of her songs which survive today
attest to the high reputation in which the ancients held her. More important
for our purposes, lyric poetry like Sappho's played an important role in the
formulation of Greek drama which borrowed heavily from lyric modes of expression
and, in fact, rose at the very time that lyric poetry began to fade. So, Sappho's
legacy lived on, at least in part, through the tragedies and comedies which
followed in her wake.

In the end, be it called the Lyric Age, the Age of Colonization, the Age of
Tyrants, the Age of Lawgivers or simply the Pre-Classical Age, these three centuries
of Greek civilization (800-500 BCE) are by any name one of the great revolutionary
periods in human history. Were it not followed by an age even more magnificent
(i.e. the Classical Age), this could easily be deemed a golden age. If nothing
else, all the titles of this pivotal epoch point up the centrality of these
centuries as a pivotal and formative moment in not only Greek history but all
of Western Civilization. And so it will come as little surprise that this was
the time and place, the laboratory if you will, where Greek drama was created.